A year has passed since the Lena events and the first,
decisive upsurgence in the revolutionary working-class movement since the
June Third coup. The tsar’s Black Hundreds and the landowners, the mob of
officials and the bourgeoisie have celebrated the 300th anniversary of
plunder, Tatar incursions, and the disgracing of Russia by the
Romanovs. The Fourth Duma has convened and begun its “work”, though it
has no faith in that work and has quite lost its former
counter-revolutionary vigour. Confusion and tedium have beset liberal
society, which is listlessly making appeals for reforms while
admitting the impracticability of anything even approximating reform.

And now comes a May Day action by Russia’s working class, who first
held a rehearsal in Riga, then went into resolute action in St. Petersburg
on May 1. (0.S.); this action has rent the dun and dreary atmosphere like a
thunderbolt. The tasks of the approaching revolution have come to the fore
again in all their grandeur, and the forces of the advanced class leading
it stand out in bold relief before hundreds of old revolutionaries, whom
persecution by hang men and desertion by friends have not defeated or
broken, and before millions of people of the new generation of democrats
and socialists.

Weeks before May Day, the government appeared to have lost its wits,
while the gentlemen who own factories behaved as if they had never had any
wits at all. The arrests and searches seemed to have turned all the
workers’ districts in the capital upside down. The provinces did not lag
behind the centre. The harassed factory owners called
conferences and adopted contradictory slogans, now threatening the workers
with punishment and lock-outs, now making concessions in advance and
consenting to stop work, now inciting the government to commit atrocities,
now reproaching the government and calling on it to include May Day in the
number of official holidays.

But even though the gendarmes showed the utmost zeal, even though they
“purged” the industrial suburbs, even though they made arrests right and
left according to their latest “lists of suspects”, it was no use. The
workers laughed at the impotent rage of the tsar’s gang and the capitalist
class and derided the governor’s menacing and pitiful “announcements”;
they wrote satirical verses and circulated them by hand or passed them on
by word of mouth; they produced, as if from nowhere fresh batches of small,
poorly printed “leaflets”, short and plain, but very instructive, calling
for strikes and demonstrations, and reminding the people of the old,
uncurtailed, revolutionary slogans of the Social-Democrats, who in 1905 led
the first onslaught of the masses against the autocracy and against
monarchy.

A hundred thousand on strike on May Day, said the government press the
next day. Bourgeois newspapers, using the first telegraphed information,
reported a hundred and twenty-five thousand (Kievskaya Mysl). A
correspondent of the central organ of the German Social-Democrats wired
from St. Petersburg that it was a hundred and fifty thousand. And the day
after the whole bourgeois press quoted a figure of
200,000–220,000. Actually the number of strikers reached 250,000!

But, apart from the number of May Day strikers, much more
impressive—and much more significant—were the revolutionary street
demonstrations held by the workers. Everywhere in and around the capital
crowds of workers singing revolutionary songs, calling loudly for
revolution and carrying red flags fought for several hours against police
and security forces frantically mobilised by the government. And those
workers made the keenest of the tsar s henchmen feel that the struggle was
in earnest, that the police were not faced with a handful of individuals
engaged in a trivial Slavophil
affair,[2] that it was actually the masses of the capital’s
working class who had risen.

This was a really brilliant, open demonstration of the proletariat’s
revolutionary aspirations, of its revolutionary forces steeled and
reinforced by new generations, of revolutionary appeals to the people and
the peoples of Russia. Last year the government and the manufacturers were
able to take comfort from the fact that the Lena explosion could not have
been foreseen, that they could not have made immediate preparations to
combat its consequences; this time, however, the monarchy had displayed
acute foresight, there had been ample time for preparation and the
“measures” taken were most “vigorous”; the result was that the tsarist
monarchy revealed its complete impotence when faced with a
revolutionary awakening of the proletarian masses.

Indeed, one year of strike struggle since Lena has shown, despite the
pitiful outcries of the liberals and their yes-men against the “craze for
striking”, against “syndicalist” strikes, against combining economic
with political strikes and vice versa—this year has shown what a great
and irreplaceable weapon for agitation among the masses, for rousing them,
for drawing them into the struggle the Social-Democratic proletariat had
forged for itself in the revolutionary epoch. The revolutionary mass-scale
strike allowed the enemy neither rest nor respite. It also hit the enemy’s
purse, and in full view of the whole world it trampled into the mud the
political prestige of the allegedly “strong” tsarist government. It
enabled more and more sections of the workers to regain at least a small
part of what had been achieved in 1905 and drew fresh sections of the
working people, even the most backward, into the struggle. It did not
exhaust the capacity of the workers, it was frequently demonstrative action
of short duration, and at the same time it paved the way for further, still
more impressive and more revolutionary open action by the masses in the
shape of street demonstrations.

During the last year, no country in the world has seen so many people
on strike for political ends as Russia, or such perseverance, such variety,
such vigour in strikes. This circumstance alone shows to the full the
pettiness, the contemptible stupidity of those liberal and liquidationist
sages who tried to “adjust” the tactics of the Russian workers in
1912–13, using the yardstick of “European” constitutional
periods, periods that were mainly devoted to the preparatory work of
bringing socialist education and enlightenment, to the masses.

The colossal superiority of the Russian strikes over those in the
European countries, the most advanced countries, demonstrates, not the
special qualities or special abilities of Russia’s workers, but the
special conditions in present-day Russia, the existence of a
revolutionary situation, the growth of a directly revolutionary
crisis. When the moment of a similar growth of revolution approaches in
Europe (there it will be a socialist and not a bourgeois-democratic
revolution, as in our country), the proletariat of the most developed
capitalist countries will launch far more vigorous revolutionary strikes,
demonstrations, and armed struggle against the defenders of wage-slavery.

This year’s May Day strike, like the series of strikes in Russia during
the last eighteen months, was revolutionary in character as distinguished
not only from the usual economic strikes but from demonstration strikes and
from political strikes demanding constitutional reforms, like, for
instance, the last Belgian
strike.[3] Those who are in bond age to a liberal world outlook and no
longer able to consider things from the revolutionary standpoint, cannot
possibly understand this distinctive character of the Russian strikes, a
character that is due entirely to the revolutionary state of Russia. The
epoch of counter-revolution and of free play for renegade sentiment has
left behind it too many people of this kind even among those who would like
to be called Social-Democrats.

Russia is experiencing a revolutionary situation because the oppression
of the vast majority of the population—not only of the proletariat but of
nine-tenths of the small producers, particularly the peasants—has
intensified to the maximum, and this intensified oppression, starvation,
poverty, lack of rights, humiliation of the people is, further more,
glaringly inconsistent with the state of Russia’s productive forces,
inconsistent with the level of the class consciousness and the demands of
the masses roused by the year 1905, and inconsistent with the state of
affairs in all neighbouring not only European but Asian—countries.

But that is not all. Oppression alone, no matter how
great, does not always give rise to a revolutionary situation in a
country. In most cases it is not enough for revolution that the lower
classes should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary
that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the
old way. This is what we see in Russia today. A political crisis is
maturing before our very eyes. The bourgeoisie has done everything
in its power to back counter-revolution and ensure “peaceful development”
on this counter-revolutionary basis. The bourgeoisie gave hangmen and
feudal lords as much money as they wanted, the bourgeoisie reviled the
revolution and renounced it, the bourgeoisie licked the boots of
Purishkevich and the knout of Markov the Second and became their lackey,
the bourgeoisie evolved theories based on “European” arguments, theories
that revile the Revolution of 1905 as an “intellectualist” revolution and
describe it as wicked, criminal, treasonous, and so on and so forth.

And yet, despite all this sacrificing of its purse, its honour and its
conscience, the bourgeoisie—from the Cadets to the Octobrists—itself
admits that the autocracy and land owners were unable to ensure
“peaceful development”, were unable to provide the basic
conditions for “law” and “order”, without which a capitalist country
cannot, in the twentieth century, live side by side with Germany and the
new China.

A nation-wide political crisis is in evidence in Russia, a crisis which
affects the very foundation of the state system and not just parts
of it, which affects the foundation of the edifice and not an
outbuilding, not merely one of its storeys. No matter how many glib phrases
our liberals and liquidators trot out to the effect that “we have, thank
God, a constitution” and that political reforms are on the order
of the day (only very limited people do not see the close connection
between these two propositions), no matter how much of this reformist
verbiage is poured out, the fact remains that not a single liquidator or
liberal can point to any reformist way out of the situation.

The condition of the mass of the population in Russia, the aggravation
of their position owing to the new agrarian policy (to which the feudal
landowners had to snatch at as their last means of salvation), the
international situation, and the nature of the general political crisis
that has taken
shape in our country—such is the sum-total of the objective conditions
making Russia’s situation a revolutionary one because of the impossibility
of carrying out the tasks of a bourgeois revolution by following the
present course and by the means available to the government and the
exploiting classes.

Such is the social, economic, and political situation, such is the
class relationship in Russia that has given rise to a specific type of
strike impossible in modern Europe, from which all sorts of renegades would
like to borrow the example, not of yesterday’s bourgeois revolutions
(through which shine gleams of tomorrow’s proletarian revolution), but of
today’s “constitutional” situation. Neither the oppression of the lower
classes nor a crisis among the upper classes can cause a revolution; they
can only cause the decay of a country, unless that country has a
revolutionary class capable of transforming the passive state of oppression
into an active state of revolt and insurrection.

The role of a truly advanced class, a class really able to rouse the
masses to revolution, really capable of saving Russia from decay, is played
by the industrial proletariat. This is the task it fulfils by means of its
revolutionary strikes. These strikes, which the liberals hate and the
liquidators cannot understand, are (as the February resolution of the
R.S.D.L.P. puts it) “one of the most effective means of overcoming the
apathy, despair, and disunion of the agricultural proletariat and the
peasantry, ... and drawing them into the most concerted,
simultaneous, and extensive revolutionary
actions”.[1]

The working class draws into revolutionary action the masses of the
working and exploited people, who are deprived of basic rights and driven
to despair. The working class teaches them revolutionary struggle, trains
them for revolutionary action, and explains to them where to find the way
out and how to attain salvation. The working class teaches them, not merely
by words, but by deeds, by example, and the example is provided not by the
adventures of solitary heroes but by mass revolutionary action combining
political and economic demands.

How plain, how clear, how close these thoughts are to every honest
worker who grasps even the rudiments of the theory of socialism and
democracy! And how alien they are to those traitors to socialism and
betrayers of democracy from among the intelligentsia, who revile or deride
the “underground” in liquidationist newspapers, assuring naive simpletons
that they are “also Social-Democrats”.

The May Day action of the proletariat of St. Petersburg, supported by
that of the proletariat of all Russia, clearly showed once again to those
who have eyes to see and ears to hear the great historic importance of the
revolutionary underground in present-day Russia. The only R.S.D.L.P. Party
organisation in St. Petersburg, the St. Petersburg Committee, compelled
even the bourgeois press, before the May Day action as well as on the eve
of January 9, and on the eve of the Tercentenary of the Romanovs as well as
on
April 4,[4] to note that St. Petersburg Committee leaflets had appeared
again and again in the factories.

Those leaflets cost colossal sacrifices. Sometimes they are quite
unattractive in appearance. Some of them, the appeals for demonstration on
April 4, for instance, merely announce the hour and place of the
demonstration, in six lines evidently set in secret and with extreme haste
in different printing shops and in different types. We have people (“also
Social-Democrats”) who, when alluding to these conditions of
“underground” work, snigger maliciously or curl a contemptuous lip and
ask: “If the entire Party were limited to the underground, how many
members would it have? Two or three hundred?” [See No. 95 (181) of
Luch, a renegade organ, in its editorial defence of
Mr. Sedov, who has the sad courage to be an outspoken liquidator. This
issue of Luch appeared five days before the May Day action, i.e.,
at the very time the underground was preparing the leaflets!]

Messrs. Dan, Potresov and Co., who make these disgraceful statements,
must know that there were thousands of proletarians in the Party ranks as
early as 1903, and 150 thousand in 1907, that even now thousands and tens
of thousands of workers print and circulate underground leaflets,
as members of underground R.S.D.L.P. cells. But the liquidationist
gentlemen know that they are protected by Stolypin
“legality” from a legal refutation of their foul lies and their
“grimaces”, which are fouler still, at the expense of the underground.

See to what extent these despicable people have lost touch with the
mass working-class movement and with revolutionary work in general! Use
even their own yardstick, deliberately falsified to suit the liberals. You
may assume for a moment that “two or three hundred” workers in
St. Petersburg took part in printing and distributing those underground
leaflets.

What is the result? “Two or three hundred” workers, the flower of the
St. Petersburg proletariat, people who not only call themselves
Social-Democrats but work as Social-Democrats, people who are esteemed and
appreciated for it by the entire working class of Russia, people
who do not prate about a “broad party” but make up in actual fact the
only underground Social-Democratic Party existing in Russia, these people
print and circulate underground leaflets. The Luch liquidators
(protected by Stolypin censors) laugh contemptuously at the “two or three
hundred”, the “underground” and its “exaggerated” importance, etc.

And suddenly, a miracle occurs! In accordance with a decision drawn up
by half a dozen members of the Executive Commission of the
St. Petersburg Committee—a leaflet printed and circulated by “two or
three hundred”—two hundred and fifty thousand people rise as
one man in St. Petersburg.

The leaflets and the revolutionary speeches by workers at meetings and
demonstrations do not speak of an “open working-class party”, “freedom
of association” or reforms of that kind, with the phantoms of which the
liberals are fooling the people. They speak of revolution as the only way
out. They speak of the republic as the only slogan which, in contrast to
liberal lies about reforms, indicates the change needed to ensure freedom,
indicates the forces capable of rising consciously to defend it.

The two million inhabitants of St. Petersburg see and hear these
appeals for revolution which go to the hearts of all toiling and oppressed
sections of the people. All St. Petersburg sees from a real, mass-scale
example what is the real way out and what is lying liberal talk about
reforms. Thousands
of workers’ contacts—and hundreds of bourgeois news papers, which are
compelled to report the St. Petersburg mass action at least in
snatches—spread throughout Russia the news of the stubborn strike
campaign of the capital’s proletariat. Both the mass of the peasantry and
the peasants serving in the army hear this news of strikes, of the
revolutionary demands of the workers, of their struggle for a republic and
for the confiscation of the landed estates for the benefit of the
peasants. Slowly but surely, the revolutionary strikes are stirring,
rousing, enlightening, and organising the masses of the people for
revolution.

The “two or three hundred” “underground people” express the
interests and needs of millions and tens of millions, they tell
them the truth about their hopeless position, open their eyes to the
necessity of revolutionary struggle, imbue them with faith in it, provide
them with the correct slogans, and win these masses away from the influence
of the high-sounding and thoroughly spurious, reformist slogans of the
bourgeoisie. And “two or three” dozen liquidators from among the
intelligentsia, using money collected abroad and among liberal merchants to
fool unenlightened workers, are carrying the slogans of that bourgeoisie
into the workers’ midst.

The May Day strike, like all the revolutionary strikes of 1912–13, has
made clear the three political camps into which present-day Russia is
divided. The camp of hangmen and feudal lords, of monarchy and the secret
police. It has done its utmost in the way of atrocities and is already
impotent against the masses of the workers. The camp of the bourgeoisie,
all of whom, from the Cadets to the Octobrists, are shouting and moaning,
calling for reforms and making fools of themselves by thinking that reforms
are possible in Russia. The camp of the revolution, the only camp
expressing the interests of the oppressed masses.

All the ideological work, all the political work in this camp is
carried out by underground Social-Democrats alone, by those who know how to
use every legal opportunity in the spirit of Social-Democracy and who are
inseparably hound up with the advanced class, the proletariat. No one can
tell beforehand whether this advanced class will succeed in leading the
masses all the way to a victorious revolution.
But this class is fulfilling its duty—leading the masses to that
solution—despite all the vacillations and betrayals on the part of the
liberals and those who are “also Social-Democrats”. All the living and
vital elements of Russian socialism and Russian democracy are being
educated solely by the example of the revolutionary struggle of the
proletariat, and under its guidance.

This year’s May Day action has shown to the whole world that the
Russian proletariat is steadfastly following its revolutionary course,
apart from which there is no salvation for a Russia that is suffocating and
decaying alive.

Notes

[2]This refers to the Slavophil demonstrations organised by reactionary
nationalist elements in St. Petersburg on March 17, 18 and 24 (March 30 and
31 and April 6), 1913 on the occasion of the Serbo Bulgarian victories over
the Turks during the first Balkan War. The reactionaries tried to use the
national liberation struggle of the Balkan peoples in the interests of the
expansionist, Great-Power politics of Russian tsarism in the Near East.

[3]The strike referred to here took place in Belgium from April 14 to
April 24 (N. S.), 1913. It was a general strike of the Belgian proletariat
demanding a constitutional reform—the introduction of universal
suffrage. Of the more than one million Belgian workers, between 400,000 and
500,000 took part in the strike. The development of the strike was
regularly reported in Pravda, and lists of Russian workers’
contributions in aid of the strike were also printed.

[4]
April 4, 1913 was the first anniversary of the shooting of workers in
the Lena Goldfields; it was marked by a one–day strike of St. Petersburg
workers in which over 85,000 people participated.